Understandably, many people blame religion for all the ills of the world. But, as Gandhi suggested, it may be wiser to realize how the men claiming divine sanction only work out—if often more crudely than their agnostic counterparts—the nihilist logic of a purely secular morality: that nothing is sacred in the battle for worldly power, and that nation-states with economies built around the endless multiplication of individual desires are likely to wage the most destructive wars in order to impose or preserve their hegemony.

Living through the great moral disasters of modernity—Western imperialism in Asia and Africa, the world wars between rival nations and empires, and the rise of totalitarianism—Gandhi could see how the civic spaces of nation-states, which had been marked off as a secular realm, were increasingly dominated by elites swearing by the cold, amoral rationality of economic self-interest and national security.

It is why Gandhi wished to reintroduce religion into politics. This sounds as perverse now as it did to the many Indian admirers of Nehru. But then religion for Gandhi was inseparable from the practice of austerity, tolerance, and compassion.